Granblue Fantasy: Relink (DEMO)

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this game. I thought I’d played the mobile version at some point, but now it looks like that was some other game. And I’d love to know what that game was…

But this game. The original Granblue Fantasy came out a decade ago for mobile devices, reuniting famed composer Nobuo Uematsu and art director Hideo Minaba, who worked together on some of the most iconic Final Fantasy games, including VI and IX, to my mind two of the best entries in the series.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is like Hyrule Warriors or Persona 5 Strikers, at least in the very small bit of the game the demo allowed me to play. We were tasked with rescuing some villagers from goblins. We would go from place to place in the village, kill a large number of goblins with AE and single target attacks, building up to the various single and group special attacks, take on a stronger goblin, and move to the next.

I’m not sure what the genre of those types of games are called. Wikipedia calls it “hack and slash“. Hack and slash and combos. Just like the also-available-on-PS5-for-free Granblue Fantasy: Versus, GF:R is focused on building chains of combos culminating in a devastating attack. For those who like their RPGs without combos, there is a difficulty mode where you smash the square button and it will do the combos for you. If that’s too much, there is another difficulty mode where you just point the stick at what you want to fight, and your character fights by itself. The game emphasizes that using these easier difficulty moves does not lock you out of any content.

The GF:R demo has three modes — tutorial, the RPG demo that culminates in a boss fight in a goblin fortress (included above), and a mission mode that drops you into a battle and you get graded on how well you did. This kind of thing isn’t unusual for an action MMO — Dragon Saga and La Tale, for instance, also have a focus on speed, combos, and retrying a mission for a better score.

The demo was fun enough. I do like boss fights, and the goblin boss was suitably enormous and telegraphed attacks well enough to give time to dodge. I don’t know if there is an option to control the other three characters on your team directly, but I would be surprised if that weren’t an option. I like games that let you play as a party — and this game is perhaps adjacent to one of my very favorite party-based RPGs, Dragon’s Dogma.

That said, I’m not really looking for games with that anime look. And, I’m past the time when I want to focus on replaying timed missions for better scores. I bounced pretty hard off of Hyrule Warriors and Persona 5 Strikers, didn’t spend much time in my recent revisit to Dragon Saga and La Tale, and… and?

The game is beautiful. The music is great. The environments are detailed. The combat animations and effects are epic. I didn’t get a sense for the plot, but the plot to Granblue Fantasy: Versus, which I also played for awhile, seemed good. It’s not going to be Tactics Ogre complicated, but that’s not a bad thing.

It’s just not for me, but it might be for you. Besides, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is coming out in a couple of months, and that is going to be my next jam. (I can’t believe I didn’t blog about DD1 when I played it a year or two ago?)